American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin - Terrance Hayes

America, you just wanted change is all, a return

To the kind of awe experienced after beholding a reign

Of gold. A leader whose metallic narcissism is a reflection

Of your own. You share a fantasy with Trinidad

James, who said “Gold all in my chain, gold all in my ring,

Gold all in my watch” & if you know what I’m talking

About, your gold is the yellow of “Lemonade” by Gucci

Mane: “Yellow rims, yellow big booty, yellow bones,

Yellow Lambs, yellow MP's, yellow watch.” Like no  

Culture before us, we relate the way the descendants

Of the raped relate to the descendants of their rapists.

May your restlessness come at last to rest, constituents

Of Midas, I wish you the opposite of what Neruda said

Of lemons, may all the gold you touch burn, rot & rust.

How to draw a perfect circle - Terrance Hayes

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head,

Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow

But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral

From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle,

The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils

And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle

Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles

Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model.

In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject

Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected

By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake

Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,

A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman.

To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away.

I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves

As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth

In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her 
wedding,

The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.

The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing,

In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows,

But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.

When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face

And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling

To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone 
witness.

The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried

On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working

Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.

At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped

Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel,

A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field

The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body

Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers,

The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O.

When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years

Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy.

I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate

Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat.

An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles

To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral.

The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings

The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see

What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees:

A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat.

The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness,

All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other,

They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open,

They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim

And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral

Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun

In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver

Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife.

The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed.

I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey

Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus

Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could

Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased,

Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy

I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout

Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder

Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me.

Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes

In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs

With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops

Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas

Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything

Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject

A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye

Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops,

A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion

Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins

Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests,

When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed

It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell,

Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model

Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them

As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself

In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell

Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.

You must look without looking to make the perfect circle.

The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid

Until the drawing is complete.

August - Yona Harvey

swatting mosquitoes

I knelt beside daddy's deck
as afternoon unraveled
like a volleyball net.
Our lawn recurred five times
up the lane, every yard's
tomato plants patterned
after the same magazine.
Granny Burns sighed
at my aunts & mother
fluttering like insects
among paper plates,
baked beans, potato salad.
Too shy to dance, I watched
my cousins' bodies bob
& pop like pogo sticks
to Roger Troutman
& Zapp, each proud step
an electric prayer.
I searched old boxes
for badminton racquets
as beads of sweat clung
to my small breasts
like a boy's mouth,
almost happy
being asked to help.

Retirado daqui.

Terrance Hayes - Lighthead

O poeta e professor Terrance Hayes lê um dos poemas da colecção Lighthead

Carp Poem - Terrance Hayes

After I have parked below the spray paint caked in the granite

grooves of the Fredrick Douglass Middle School sign

where men and women sized children loiter like shadows

draped in the outsized denim, jerseys, bangles, braids, and boots

that mean I am no longer young, after I have made my way

to the New Orleans Parish Jail down the block

where the black prison guard wearing the same weariness

my prison guard father wears buzzes me in, 

I follow his pistol and shield along each corridor trying not to look

at the black men boxed and bunked around me

until I reach the tiny classroom where two dozen black boys are

dressed in jumpsuits orange as the pond full of carp I saw once in Japan,

so many fat snaggle-toothed fish ganged in and lurching for food

that a lightweight tourist could have crossed the pond on their backs

so long as he had tiny rice balls or bread to drop into the water

below his footsteps which I’m thinking is how Jesus must have walked

on the lake that day, the crackers and wafer crumbs falling

from the folds of his robe, and how maybe it was the one fish

so hungry it leapt up his sleeve that he later miraculously changed

into a narrow loaf of bread, something that could stick to a believer’s ribs,

and don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer too, in the power of food at least,

having seen a footbridge of carp packed gill to gill, packed tighter

than a room of boy prisoners waiting to talk poetry with a young black poet,

packed so close they might have eaten each other had there been nothing else to eat.

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